About

Kill Me Dance (Japannese: キルミーダンス) is an incoherent choreograph dance invented in a Japanese 4-panel manga Kill Me Baby.[1] This crazy dance became to a subject for dancing covers and hand-drawn animated videos on the Japanese web in 2012.

Origin

The first appearance of “Kill Me Dance” was on the first comic book cover’s backside which was released in January 2009. It shows 16 “discontinuous” movements with the caption “Let’s make a flipbook by clipping each panels and sorting them along the numbers! Make an anime by yourself!”.

Then, the TV anime series for this manga aired from January to March of 2012 visualized this joke into the real dance in the ending movie with the theme song “The True Secrets of the Pair’s Feelings” (ふたりのきもちのほんとのひみつ Futari no Kimochi no Honto no Himitsu) sung by voice actors Mutsumi Tamura[2] and Chinatsu Akasaki.[3]

Spread

By given the animated version, “Kill Me Dance” succeeded to catch an attention among anime otakus. They soon began mimicking this crazy dance by hand-drawn animation or Miku Miku DanceCGI characters. In addition, some challengers had tried dancing “Kill Me Dance” in real. The momentum of those fanworks was triggered by these earliest instances posted to the Japanese video sharing service Nico Nico Douga (NND) in late January/early February of that year.

During the anime period, about 100 videos for “Kill Me Dance” had been uploaded to NND, and those fan works have continued been posted occasionally since after that.[4] The Japanese illustrators community pixiv has a hundred of parody illustrations for the dance.[5] Besides, several “Kill Me Dance” videos by non-Japanese people can be found on YouTube.[6]